PR: “Domainindex.com Downgrades Internet TLD: .COM, .NET from AAA to AA”

DomainIndex.com is supposedly “the domain industry’s leading internet domain name benchmarking, rating and appraisal service.”  I don’t recall ever hearing of (or using) DomainIndex.com before, but I saw an interesting press release the company put out today and want to share it with you.

According to the press release, DomainIndex.com “has changed its rating for the .com and the .net TLD from AAA to AA. The step has been taken after the release of an official statement by U.S. authorities of its intent to continue seizing .com, .net, .cc, .tv and .name domains and forcibly redirecting .org (and probably .us) domains.”

I don’t really know what this means, but I personally have no worries about my domain names or websites being seized by governmental authorities. My personal opinion is that if you aren’t  counterfeiting  anything, selling counterfeit goods, or helping people do illegal activities that are against US laws, you should be okay. I don’t like the seize first ask questions later way they go about this, but I personally don’t believe this impacts domain values or increases risk for the average domain owner.

Anyway, I thought this press release sounded interesting.  Have you used DomainIndex.com before, and what do you make of this?

Full press release is below.

Domainindex.com, the domain industry’s leading internet domain name benchmarking, rating and appraisal service, has announced today that it has changed its rating for the .com and the .net TLD from AAA to AA. The step has been taken after the release of an official statement by U.S. authorities of its intent to continue seizing .com, .net, .cc, .tv and .name domains and forcibly redirecting .org (and probably .us) domains. Officially, over 750 domains have been seized in the last few months by the U.S. government, most of them from overseas registrars. The U.S. government claims that illegal activities take place on these domains. However, many of the domains seem to have been seized simply for linking to gambling sites or sites streaming sporting events on the web.

Domainindex.com considers these seizures a threat to any .com domain and the internet DNS in general, given the fact that seized domains can be resold for the benefit of the U.S. government even more. This increases the threat to any valuable domains within these TLDs. Therefore, we’ve had to rerate the TLD today and to lower its rating by two steps, from AAA to AA. While the technical infrastructure, business and economic environment still deserve the AAA level, the legal situation no longer supports this rating.

About 50 large portfolio owners consult Domainindex.com ratings for domain names portfolio risk management and investor reporting. Because .com is still the “king” of TLDs, we do not expect any changes in customer asset allocations. Nonetheless, the step has been taken to make clear that other ccTLDs are not affected and will keep their AAA levels. Note that no generic TLD currently has an AAA rating anymore.

We will watch closely how, in the future, the U.S. and other governments handle this issue. Hopefully, we will be able to upgrade .com again. However, we are pessimistic, as a change in this policy will require a substantial change in US politics and in the governance of TLDs.

Domainindex.com is a domain appraisal and benchmarking service. It provides automated and manual appraisal of individual domain names and portfolios. Domainindex also provides indices to the domain industry, tracking the value of each TLD and benchmarking the holdings of large portfolio owners with respect to the markets. Additionally, Domainindex provides ratings for 60 TLDs, rating them by economic, legal and technical criteria. Domain ratings are used by large portfolio owners to judge their risk profiles and exposures in the various TLDs.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

21 COMMENTS

  1. I’ve never heard of them before, and I’ve been around this community long enough to know and use virtually every service out there.

    But then again, their press release worked. It got you talking and me tweeting about them – which is what a good press release ought to do.

  2. Though Sedo claims that IDNX is the first these guys from domainindex.com been opereating for years.
    And they collected alot of info over the years.

    Their press release, wich i take with a grain of salt, even though i published it also a few hours ago holds some thruth.

    As an investor/developer you need to make sure that you are not violating US law(s).
    That is reallity for you. And this might bring down the price.
    Overall the press release was rather bold. But still…..

  3. I’ve known the website for about 2 months and their detailed TLD stats (“indices”) are pretty interesting. I recommend having a look at them.

  4. HA! Who the heck is domain index?? Sounds like some kind of self serving advertisement rather than a legit PR. Do they think they are Goldman Sachs? Made me laugh.

  5. Well it might seem a little over the top but we use their services or rather use the ratings and indices to benchmark our fund/portfolio against the market. Investors are used to this and they want independent risk and performance evaluation.
    We will not change anything in our allocation of mainly .com, however the step is necessary to make people understand that .com is not a safe haven and any domain can be taken from you in the worst case.

  6. The lowdown is that they have no Compete.com rank or data, but they do have an alexa rating of around 700k which is pretty good actually. Also interesting to note they have an Alexa rank of 98k in India? Odd.

    Also to note, alexa has them with 12 sites linking in, almost all of which are some ArbitraryString.info sites.

    Being that they are an analytical company you think they would have considered these analytics before trying to pretend like they’ve been around for a while. You could simply use their site to do an appraisal on their own domain to see all this info.

    All this said though, the site looks interesting. It looks like it wants to compete with Estibot basically. If you go to the tools section it is strikingly similar. It does have some neat tools available too which seem useful. What doesn’t seem useful is another Automated appraisal site. We definitely don’t need that.

  7. We use their service when profiling and appraising domains in bulk for large portfolio owners. Their ratings service is interesting but I use their tools as a key part of my business. Its like a better version of Estibot that has hard facts and data behind the evaluations with expert opinions. The guys behind it have been in the domain business for over a decade so they have experience.

  8. One other point – they have relationships to help domain owners sell their domains and to make development partnerships as well… so just calling them an “appraisal site” is inaccurate.

  9. i know them for 2 years i think they recently moved from domainsindex.com to domainindex.com ..they also have a reverse whois which why i use it mostly.

  10. I used their automated domain appraisal tool and compared it to other websites which offer automated appraisals such as Estibot / Valuate.
    I checked the domain name FreeCloudProvider.com

    Estibot / Valuate $5
    Domainindex $37,600

    Quite a difference. Not sure what to make of this and how useful this tool is.

  11. @Yvonne I would take estibot and every other appraisal site with a grain of salt. The value of anything is determined by what the buyer whats to pay. Thats all there is to it.

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